Читать книгу Now or Never - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 7

‘Is Hughie back yet?’ Stella asked Richard, slipping off her coat and going to fill the kettle.

‘I heard him come in a few minutes ago. He went straight upstairs,’ Richard told her. ‘Pleasant evening?’

‘No!’

Putting down his paper, Richard looked at his wife. She had been a slightly bolshy, outspoken junior probation officer when he had first met her—they had both belonged to the same ramblers group—and he had courted her steadily for two years before asking her to marry him. His widowed mother had initially been slightly hostile towards her, but that hostility had melted when Stella had produced Hughie.

‘So what happened?’ he asked curiously.

Handing him the cup of tea she had just made him, Stella sighed. ‘Maggie announced that she’s pregnant!’

‘At her age!’ Richard looked appalled. Much as he loved Hughie he had never been a ‘hands on’ type of father, Stella reflected ruefully. Night-time feeds and nappy changing had all been left to her. Not that she had minded. If she was honest, the love she had felt for her son as a baby had been far more intense and passionate than the calm, relaxed emotion she felt for Richard. Which did not mean, of course, that she didn’t love him. She did.

‘I certainly wouldn’t want to be in that position,’ Richard told her.

‘Well, we aren’t likely to be, are we?’ Stella replied wryly.

She knew it was unfair of her to remind him of the growing infrequency of their sex life. He was after all fifty-seven, they had been married for twenty-seven years, and sex had never been high on their list of shared priorities anyway. And at her age …

But she and Maggie were the same age, she couldn’t help inwardly reminding herself. And the idea of Maggie deciding she was too old to merit a good sex life was as preposterous as … as Maggie’s pregnancy? And it wasn’t just Maggie, was it? There was Alice with Stuart, and Nicki with Kit. No, none of her friends lived a life where sex was reduced to a rare occurrence, that sometimes actually bypassed even ‘high days and holidays’. Only she was expected to be non-sexual and like it!

Her frown gave way to a smile as the door opened and Hughie came into the room.

She and Richard were both tall, but Hughie was over six feet three, his body well muscled from the rugby he played. To her, though, Stella acknowledged, there was still something that was almost little-boyish about his face at times.

‘Mum, have you and Dad got a minute?’ he asked.

He was nervous, Stella could see that. Automatically her stomach tightened. This was something Maggie was going to have to get used to, this never-ending, relentless awareness of the vulnerability of one’s child, coupled with the frightening realisation of how little one could do to protect them and keep them totally safe.

‘Of course. Do you want a cup of tea? I’ve just made some,’ she offered.

‘No. No … Look … there just isn’t any easy way to tell you this … I know you’re going to be … Julie is pregnant and the baby is mine.’

Somehow or other, Stella discovered that she was sitting down, whilst Richard in contrast was now standing up, his shock showing in his eyes as he stormed furiously, ‘What were you saying about him being intelligent? My God! How the hell much intelligence does it take to use a bloody condom?’

‘I did … It burst.’

Nicki could see the Adam’s apple moving in Hughie’s throat as he swallowed. He was still a boy, really. A baby. Her baby! A wave of fiercely protective maternalism struck her. He was looking at her, waiting for her to say something, his puppy dog eyes pleading with her … trusting her …

Trusting her, Stella recognised as she forced herself to bite back the words, Are you sure it’s yours?

Richard, though, felt no such restraint, or tact, she realised as she heard her husband bursting out with the words that were hammering inside her own head.

Instantly Hughie went white, his hands clenching as he stared accusingly at his father.

‘Of course I am sure. Julie was … I was her first,’ he mumbled, brick-red. ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Maybe not, but what is our business is that our son, our clever, clever son, has got his girlfriend pregnant while she is still at school and he is in his first year at university! I thought you told me it was virtually over between the two of you.’

Richard was shaking his head, as though he still couldn’t comprehend what he was hearing.

‘It was … it is.’

‘It’s over?’ Stella knew she would never totally understand the world of the modern young, where a couple could fall in love, and commit to one another sexually only to tire of the relationship within months, if not weeks, and decide to go their separate ways. It had been so different in her own day. ‘So … so what …?’

‘Our relationship is over,’ Hughie agreed. ‘But that does not alter the fact that I am the father of Julie’s baby. And naturally I want to do the right thing for them both,’ he added proudly.

‘Naturally,’ Stella agreed, a small spiky shoot of hope beginning to emerge through the shocked chaos of her anxiety.

‘Of course, Julie wants to have the baby.’

The spiky shoot withered.

‘Of course,’ Stella acknowledged hollowly. Well, they did, these modern girls, didn’t they?

‘I will have to help support it … financially, I mean.’

‘Yes, you damn well will,’ Richard told him savagely. ‘And if you think for one minute that I am going to put my hand in my pocket to pay for your—’

‘Richard!’ Stella interrupted him warningly. ‘Obviously, we’re still feeling the shock at the moment, Hughie, but tomorrow I think your father and I should get in touch with Julie’s parents to discuss things.’

‘No … you can’t. There isn’t any point.’

‘What? Why not?’ Stella asked.

‘Julie’s father refuses to accept what’s happened. He’s thrown Julie out. He says he never wants to see her again.’

‘What?’

Now Stella was shocked. She had seen enough of what could happen to girls under such circumstances during her probation service days to feel genuinely protective towards Julie, and outraged by her father’s attitude.

‘Well, where has she gone—where is she?’

‘Here,’ Hughie told them uncomfortably. ‘Upstairs in my room. Ma … what else could I do?’ he appealed to Stella. ‘She is my responsibility. They both are, at least until the baby is born. I couldn’t just leave her. I mean, it’s not as if she’s got any other family to go to!’

‘All right, Hughie. I understand. You’d better go upstairs and bring her down.’ Stella sighed.

As soon as the door had closed behind him Richard exploded. ‘No way. No way are we going to have her here. Stella …’

‘What else can we do?’ Stella asked him logically. ‘And anyway, I don’t imagine it will be for very long. Her father will probably come round. And since Hughie is the baby’s father, I feel—’

‘I doubt it, from what I know of him. He and I were both in a local “Think Tank Group” a couple of years ago. Originally he’s from somewhere in the North—a small, very strait-laced mining town. He’s still got an enclosed community mentality, he’s very narrow-minded—bigoted, I would say. He wasn’t a very popular member of our team, definitely got a chip on his shoulder from somewhere.’

Stella frowned. ‘I didn’t know you knew Julie’s father—you never said.’

Richard gave a brief shrug. ‘The project ended and we went our separate ways. Not the sort of chap one would want to keep in contact with, really. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t think he’d be someone who would budge once he’d taken a stand over something. Bit of a soap-box operator when it comes to modern morals and so on. Likes to hold forth about the subject. He’ll consider Julie’s situation to be a serious loss of face.’

‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that she is his daughter …’

Stella stopped speaking as the kitchen door opened and Hughie ushered Julie in.

Dressed in baggy trousers and a huge loose top as she was, it was hard to tell that she was pregnant at all. Her face looked very pale, though, Stella acknowledged, and she could see the smudges of mascara on Julie’s cheeks where she had been crying.

In fact she looked as though she was about to start crying now, Stella recognised.

‘Julie, it’s all right,’ she said firmly, going up to the girl and putting her arms maternally around her. ‘Hughie has told us what’s happened. He says, though, that the relationship between the two of you is over … is that true?’

Ignoring the angry look Hughie was shooting her, Stella waited patiently for Julie’s reply. There was no way she wanted Julie to turn round at a later date and claim that Hughie had dropped her because she was pregnant. But, to her relief, Julie immediately nodded, her voice papery thin as she whispered, ‘Yes. I … we … I’m not going to keep the baby,’ she burst out tearfully, ‘but I couldn’t let my dad make me kill it and I know that’s what he would have tried to do.’

She was sobbing in earnest now, and Stella tried to calm her down.

‘Julie, it’s all right,’ she said reassuringly. ‘No one is going to hurt your baby. When is it due, by the way?’ she asked. ‘Do you know?’

‘Three months.’

Stella thought she must have misheard her.

‘Three months,’ she repeated. ‘No … I don’t think …’

‘It’s three months!’ Julie insisted stubbornly, shaking her head and begging Hughie, ‘You tell her.’

As she saw the confirmation in Hughie’s eyes Stella frantically grappled with the enormity of what she was facing.

‘Julie! Your parents … When did you tell them?’ she asked uncertainly. Three months! Had Julie registered with a doctor? The hospital? Had she …?

‘When Hughie came home. I couldn’t tell them before. I was too frightened … and I didn’t want to tell anyone until I knew it would be too late for anyone to make me do … anything.’ Her voice was stubborn, her facial expression saying that she felt proud of her actions, like a small child who thought she had outwitted the adults around her. Stella’s heart sank even further.

And it was certainly too late for anyone to make her do anything now, Stella acknowledged. Julie was seventeen, six months pregnant and still at school, and her father had thrown her out. Stella closed her eyes.

‘What am I going to do? I can’t go home! My dad …’ Tears were brimming in the huge washed-out eyes.

‘What you’re going to do for the time being is stay here with us,’ Stella told her as calmly as she could, firmly taking control of the situation. Over Julie’s downbent head she saw the look of relief and hope that Hughie was giving her, and her own eyes threatened to mist.

‘Thanks, Ma,’ he told her gruffly, coming over to give her a hug. ‘I told Julie you’d know what to do!’

Things would have to be sorted out with Julie’s parents, of course, a way found for her to go back home, but there was no point in them discussing that right now. Julie looked exhausted, and, now that she knew just how far advanced her pregnancy was, Stella felt seriously concerned for her.

Their house was an old Victorian three-storey one with plenty of bedrooms, and a granny suite on the top floor where Richard’s mother had lived whilst she had still been alive, so there was no problem in finding room for Julie. But the sooner she was back at home with her own family, the better, Stella resolved.

It was all very well for Hughie to face up to his responsibilities and to accept that he had them, but Julie’s parents had their responsibilities as well!

‘Mmm … I’ve missed you.’

‘I’ve only been gone for four hours,’ Maggie tried to protest, but Oliver was too busy kissing her to let her speak properly.

‘Four hours, fifteen minutes and several seconds,’ Oliver corrected her as he cupped her face and smiled down into her eyes.

Irresistibly his glance was drawn to her mouth. Maggie had the most wonderful, the most sexy, the most kissable mouth he had ever seen. In fact, so far as he was concerned, Maggie had the most wonderful, the most sexy, the most kissable, the most lovable everything any woman possibly could have.

‘How was The Club?’ he asked her teasingly as he drew her closer, one hand in the small of her back, the other resting on her still-flat stomach. ‘I suppose they’ve all rushed home to knit baby clothes.’

To his bemusement and her own chagrin, Maggie immediately burst into tears.

‘Baby hormones,’ she excused her reaction to Oliver, but as she said the words she could hear inside her head Nicki’s voice, taut with anger and contempt, insisting, ‘You can’t be pregnant!’

As he registered the brief look of betraying bleakness in her eyes, Oliver demanded gently, ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

Maggie closed her eyes and took a deep, painful breath.

‘You are far too perceptive,’ she told him wryly.

‘We made a pact, Maggie,’ Oliver reminded her. ‘No game playing, no hidden agendas, no hidden anything between us.’ Lifting her hand to his lips and placing a kiss in her open palm, he added, ‘We agreed that our love deserves better than that.’

Now more tears were threatening her composure but for a different reason this time, brought on by a different emotion. Pain and joy—strange how in their intensity both could call forth the same physical response.

‘How could I ever forget us making that pact?’ Maggie answered him, her eyes luminous with her love.

Self-protection had been a necessity following the breakup of her marriage and had become a way of life for her. Strong, feisty, successful career women in their forties were vulnerable in a way that women one or two decades younger were not. All the more so when, like Maggie, they broke one of society’s taboos by falling in love with a younger man. Because of that, Maggie was very protectively careful of her emotional responses. It was rare for her to make such an open admission of her feelings. That alone was enough to alert Oliver to the fact that something—or somebody—had seriously hurt her.

‘Tell me,’ he insisted.

‘It’s Nicki,’ Maggie admitted shakily. ‘She hates the idea of me having this baby.’

‘She what?’ Oliver frowned. He knew how important Maggie’s friends were to her; he had heard the full history of their relationship, their shared traumas, and the way they had always supported and protected one another. He knew too how excited Maggie had been about telling them the news, and he could see beneath the brittle bravery of her smile just how hurt and shocked she was.

‘She says that I’m too old,’ Maggie told him. ‘She says that I’m depriving another younger woman of the chance to have a child. She says that I’m doing it to … to keep you—’

‘To keep me!’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Maggie, there is no way on this earth that you could ever or will ever get rid of me. You know that. You know how much you mean to me. How much I love you. You know what I think … what I believe.’ He looked at her, holding her gaze with his own. ‘You … us … our love, they are my destiny, Maggie. You are the woman I have longed for all my adult life. If one of us deserves to be accused of holding the other to our love via our baby, then that one is me.’

Maggie felt the tight lump of anguish inside her easing. This conviction that Oliver had, and spoke so naturally and easily to her about, that he had been destined to love her, which he made sound so down-to-earth, so much an irrefutable fact, was something she simply could not discuss with anyone else. Because she was afraid she, they, Oliver would be laughed at?

Her friends were mature women and mature women did not believe in fate. Or that love could transcend time, cross the generation barrier? Why? Because she herself dared not allow herself to believe it, no matter what Oliver might say? Because she suspected that had any other man but Oliver spoken to her in such a vein she would have dismissed him as being some daydreaming crank?

‘Nicki’s main concern is that I’m not aware of the problems of being an older mother. She says she can’t understand how I can claim to want a child now when I refused to have one with Dan.’

Now it was her turn to look into Oliver’s eyes.

‘Isn’t it time you told her the truth about that?’ he suggested gently.

Restlessly Maggie moved away from him.

‘It isn’t as straightforward as that. Nicki has always thought a lot of Dan. He was her friend before he and I started dating. She actually introduced us. I don’t want to …’

‘Destroy her illusions?’ Oliver supplied.

He had a habit of lifting one eyebrow when he asked a question and Maggie found herself wondering if it was a mannerism his son or daughter would inherit. Just to think about the coming baby made her heart turn over and melt with love and yearning.

‘Which do you least want to destroy, Maggie? Her illusions or your friendship? Which do you think she values the more? Which would be most important to you? Don’t you think she might even feel a little insulted to know that you believed both her friendship and her ego to be so fragile? Or are you afraid that she will be offended that you have withheld the truth from her for so long?’

‘It wasn’t a deliberate decision,’ Maggie defended herself. ‘And it wasn’t so much that I wanted to withhold the truth from my friends …’

‘No, what you wanted to do—your prime concern,’ Oliver emphasised, ‘was to protect Dan.’

‘It wasn’t his fault that he was infertile,’ Maggie protested. ‘He was devastated when we learned that the problem lay with him …’

‘So devastated that he went out and had an affair!’ Oliver agreed dryly.

‘Oliver, you aren’t being fair! Try to put yourself in his position. He desperately wanted us to have children. He had always wanted to have a family, and when nothing happened, he was wonderfully supportive of me.’

‘Until he found out that he was the one who couldn’t give you a child and not the other way round.’

‘I think he had the affair to … to test out what he had been told,’ Maggie responded quietly. ‘I think it was a form of denial, coupled with a feeling of shock and bereavement, of grieving … and that afterwards he simply couldn’t bear to stay with me because of the destruction of the hopes we had both shared for so long and because …’

‘Because you knew the truth,’ Oliver inserted grimly.

‘Because he was afraid that my love might become pity,’ Maggie corrected him gently.

‘How long is it since he left you, Maggie?’ Oliver demanded.

Would it ever go away, this tiny, gritty piece of jealousy over the man who had shared so much of her life before him; who had had so much of her, with her, before him? He knew how much she had loved her husband and how much she had suffered when their marriage had broken up, but his anger against Dan went deeper than jealousy. Dan was, so far as Oliver was concerned, responsible not just for hurting Maggie, but for undermining her, for letting her take the blame for the failure of their marriage and, even more importantly, for their failure to have children.

Maggie watched Oliver warily. In her younger days she knew she would have been tempted to feel flattered by such evidence of jealousy, but Dan was an important part of her past and of herself, and not even to please Oliver could she deny what she and Dan had once shared. What they had once shared … but what about her ongoing protection of him?

That was merely a habit, and nothing more, Maggie immediately reassured herself. But nonetheless, Oliver had raised an issue that Maggie knew she ought to deal with.

No matter what she might have said in the heat of her distress earlier, the friendship she shared with the others meant far too much for her to see it damaged. Nicki’s reaction to her news had hurt her, yes, but that did not mean that she no longer valued what they shared.

She could tell Nicki that, but somehow she did not feel able to tell her the truth about Dan. Why? To protect Nicki, or to protect her ex-husband?

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Oliver apologising ruefully.

A little guiltily Maggie shook her head. Oliver had obviously mistaken her absorbed silence in her own thoughts for anger and punishment.

Immediately she went towards him, leaning her head on his chest and wrapping her arms as far around him as she could. He had done so much for her; given her so much. After Dan she had believed there would never be another man she could love, another man who would love her enough to heal the pain of her loss.

‘You should tell Nicki,’ Oliver was insisting.

‘I think there’s more to her reaction than just the fact that Dan and I never had children,’ Maggie responded. ‘I’m concerned about her, Oliver. She was so wrought up, so … so unlike her normal self.’

‘Maybe so, but my concern is all for you and our baby,’ Oliver informed her.

Their baby … The baby her best friend felt she had no right to have!

These years of their lives they were going through now were, Maggie knew, a very, very dangerous rite of passage; a rite of passage that in many ways had become the last female taboo.

Maggie felt strongly that it was the responsibility of her own generation—the generation that had so successfully pushed back so many boundaries, and gifted so many freedoms to the decades of women following in their footsteps—to take up this challenge as they had done so many others.

This treacherous passage across the turbulence of the deep, dangerous emotional waters of these years were in their way as traumatic and life-defining as, perhaps even more so than, those of being a teenager.

Certainly no one—as far as she knew—wrote witty diaries featuring the hormone-induced miseries of her age group. Women of a ‘certain age’, to use a phrase that Maggie detested, had, it seemed, to be divided into two very different groups: those who clung gamely or ridiculously to the wreckage of their youth (depending on which paper and magazines one read) or those who simply opted to disappear and become ‘past it’ secondary people, useful only for the support they gave to others.

But why should this be the case? Maggie questioned. Where was it written down that it had to be so? Was it that women stripped of their youth but left with their power were such a strong force that they had to be mocked and reviled, taunted and made to feel that they were now second-class citizens? Maggie didn’t know. What she did know was that she was there in the vanguard, holding her breath, cheering on her own generation, waiting to see if they could perform the same transformation on this age that they had performed on every other they had passed through.

Her peers, her co-baby boomers, bulge yearers, were an awesomely powerful force, a huge wave of humanity, conceived in hope and celebration, a generation born into peace and prosperity, given unique gifts by their parents and their memories of those who had sacrificed their lives and freedoms.

Truly, if one wanted to look at it in such a way, a very special ‘Fairy Godmother’ had stood silently, rejoicing and hoping, in the wings at their births.

They’d been sprung free of the destructive trap of war that had snared their parents and grandparents, and no limits had been set on what they could achieve or what they could be.

Their lives had been a whole new learning curve for humanity, and, yes, there had been mistakes, foolishness, vanity, but also there had been spectacular life-changing, life-enhancing steps forward, ‘giant leaps’ for mankind of many different types, and this, their move forward into something so reviled and feared by folklore, was surely in its own way one very giant leap.

Get it right and, not just her own sex, but men and women alike of future generations would only look back in fond amusement that there could ever have been a time when a woman’s fiftieth birthday was something she suffered in fear and shame. Get it wrong and they would be consigning not just themselves, but heaven alone knew how many future generations to a life as medieval in its way as that of refusing to allow women to learn to read and write.

And, Maggie felt, it was men like Oliver who would share and rejoice in her sex’s crossing of this Styx-like river of fear.

The change of life! It was a turbulent and on occasion even frightening time, no one could deny that, but the strength it took to grow through it was life-enhancing and life-giving. Maggie knew far more about herself and her needs, her realities now than she had ever done as a girl. The things she had taken for granted then were infinitely more precious to her now, and those precious things included her friends. And her memories.

That her fellow humans had given her this chance to have the child she had so much yearned for, and with the right man, was surely something that should be celebrated, a glorious, wonderful gift that she had made a vow to appreciate and treasure, to love and send out into the world knowing how generously and with how much love he or she had been given life.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ Oliver was whispering sexily in her ear.

Maggie hid a small smile. How many times in the early days of their marriage had she and Dan exchanged those very words? Young lovers did make up in bed. And Oliver was young—at least compared to her. On the list of dos and don’ts they had been given by the clinic had been the information that sex was okay, so long as they were careful.

When she had learned about Dan’s affair her sex drive had deserted her completely, and she had believed that it had gone for good, destroyed by her pain, until Oliver had shown her otherwise! With him she had discovered the zest and excitement she remembered from her youth; she had relearned the pleasure of being physically loved, of giving and sharing that love. And she had also learned that perhaps the strongest aphrodisiac in the world was to be loved and desired by someone who simply wanted to put her needs first.

Dan had been a sexy, skilful, passionate lover, but it was Oliver who had shown her what sensitivity could bring to desire.

‘Mmm …’ she agreed, her eyes glinting with tenderness and teasing as she added insouciantly, ‘They did say at the clinic that I should make sure I got enough sleep.’

‘Sleep. That wasn’t …’

As she started to laugh Oliver grinned at her.

‘Okay, but just you wait until later,’ he mock threatened her as they went upstairs, their arms around one another.

The sight of Stuart’s car parked outside the house as she stopped her own made Alice’s stomach clench a little. She had known he was due to return home this evening, but she had not been sure when.

The others had thought it very glamorous when she had first met Stuart and she had learned that he was an airline pilot, and if she was honest so had she! He had stood out dramatically amongst the boys who formed part of their extended crowd of friends, tall, tanned from his stopovers abroad, blue-eyed, blond-haired and so good-looking that Alice had wondered why on earth he’d been singling her out.

‘Because you are stunningly pretty, and good and sweet, and he’s fallen in love with you, stoopid,’ Nicki teased her gently.

‘Yeah, and he’s seen how sexy you look in those hot pants.’ Maggie laughed, ignoring Alice’s pink-cheeked protests.

The outfits Maggie insisted they wore for their ‘gigs’, Alice suspected, got them far more attention than their music.

Stuart obviously thought so, because one of the first things he did was ask her not to wear them.

‘There’s only one man I want you to look sexy for and that’s me!’ he told her with the same dizzyingly masterful maturity with which he swept her off her feet.

Stuart no longer flew commercial flights. Instead he worked for the airline as an instructor, flying only as a relief pilot when necessary, which was what he had recently been doing.

‘Don’t you ever worry about him … I mean, mixing with all those air stewardesses?’ She was asked that question so many times over the years that she had her response off pat. A smile, a gentle laugh and small shake of her head. But of course she worried. Especially in the early years of their marriage. Stuart was after all a highly sexed man. But he was also a man who showed in many different ways that he loved her.

This house, for instance, that he insisted on buying when they first knew that her second pregnancy was twins. She was horrified at the cost of it—a very large detached house, set in its own immense garden, with an adjacent paddock. She protested that they could not possibly afford it, but Stuart was equally insistent that he wanted them to have it.

When the twins arrived, Stuart changed his own expensive car for a much smaller model and bought her a top-of-the-range four-wheel drive so that she could transport the children in comfort and safety. Zoë’s riding lessons and her pony and all the other extracurricular activities the children wanted, Stuart paid for without complaint. The allowance he insisted on giving her was a generous one, and the presents he brought her back from his trips drew the envious admiration of her friends.

No, Stuart never neglected her either in bed or out of it, something for which, if the stories she heard from other women were to be believed, she ought to be extremely grateful. And of course she was.

But the house, the allowance, the car, all of them were things she sometimes felt she would gladly have bartered just for the opportunity to sit down with Stuart and talk to him, to have her opinions sought and valued, to feel that he regarded her as an equal partner in their relationship, and that she mattered to him not because she was his wife, but because she was herself!

He was in the kitchen when she walked in, still an extraordinarily handsome man, his thick once-blond hair silver-grey now, the reading glasses he still pretended he did not really need adding an extra touch of subtle sexuality to his features. He always had been and always would be the kind of man who drew women’s glances, and, although he might deny it, Alice knew that there was that little touch of vanity in his make-up that meant that he needed their female recognition of his maleness.

As he saw her he shuffled the papers he had been reading and stood up.

‘Have you been in long?’ Alice asked.

‘A couple of hours. When I realised it was your night out with the others, I went down to the gym for an hour.’

Unlike her, Stuart was something of a gym fanatic, his body still lean and muscular. Alice had at one stage endeavoured to become more exercise conscious, but Stuart had laughed at her, refusing to take her seriously.

‘I love you just the way you are,’ he had told her fondly, spoiling his compliment slightly by adding, ‘Every single bit of you!’

He looked tired, Alice recognised, but diplomatically she did not say so. She had learned early on in their relationship that Stuart hated to admit to any kind of vulnerability or weakness, no matter how small. She suspected that this had a lot to do with the fact that his father had been a high-achieving, very macho man, a Second World War fighter pilot, decorated for bravery and revered by his wife and Stuart’s three older sisters. Stuart had been reared in a family where his maleness had elevated him to almost godlike status, but the price for this had been that he’d never been allowed to show himself as mortal.

Her own father had fought in the same war, but the experience had affected his nerves in some way, and Alice could remember her mother’s constant anxiety that Alice did not make too much noise or do anything that might upset her father, around whom their small household had revolved every bit as much as Stuart’s had revolved around his.

To some extent Alice knew that she and Stuart had repeated this pattern. Stuart’s job had meant that when he had been at home there had been times when she had automatically kept the children away from him so that he could catch up on his sleep. Times when she had in a number of small ways protected Stuart from the children and the children from him!

So, rather than commenting on his tiredness, and mindful of the news she had to give him about her plans, she said instead, ‘I’m glad you’ve got some leave days now—’

‘I wish!’ Stuart interrupted her grimly. ‘I’ve got a series of meetings coming up in the city.’

He had his back to her as he was speaking and Alice suddenly had the feeling that for some reason he didn’t want her to see his face. A tiny sharp spike of unease touched her, like the beginnings of an unwanted spot, as yet unseen, but still felt beneath the outer skin.

And yet there was no reason for her to feel like that. Stuart was frequently away on business after all. Perhaps it was because she had been building herself up to telling him about her OU plans, waiting for the right moment. Yes, that was probably what it was, she reassured herself.

‘How long do you think you will be away?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Alice, I just don’t know. As long as it takes, however long that is. What is this anyway? What’s all the fuss about?’

His irritation made her clench her stomach muscles defensively.

‘I wasn’t making a fuss,’ Alice protested. ‘It’s just that … Well, there was something I wanted to discuss with you.’

‘If it’s about that idiot you hired who claimed he was a gardener, then we don’t need to discuss anything. Sack him.’

‘Stuart, it isn’t about the garden! It’s—it’s about me!’

Now that she had his attention, Alice felt her apprehension increasing.

‘You?’ He was frowning. ‘What do you mean it’s about you? Look, Alice, can’t we leave this for another time? Right now the last thing I want or need is an in-depth discussion on anything!’

He was getting annoyed, Alice recognised silently, registering all the tell-tale signs.

Her heart sank, but she was not going to back down.

‘No, we can’t leave it, I’m afraid, Stuart. It’s too important for that. I … I’ve enrolled for an Open University degree course.’

‘What?’

He was, Alice noticed, staring at her blankly, as though he hadn’t properly taken in what she had said.

‘I thought you said it was something important,’ he challenged her. ‘For God’s sake, Alice! Don’t you ever listen to anything I say? I’ve just told you that I’m up to my eyes in it at work and you’re prattling on about some blasted college course.’

Alice could feel her stomach muscles clenching, but not this time with tension. She very seldom got angry, it just wasn’t in her nature, but right now …

‘You don’t mind, then?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Mind?’ He gave a brief, almost contemptuous shrug. ‘I don’t really see the point, but it’s your choice.’

‘Yes,’ Alice agreed even more quietly. ‘It is.’

Changing the subject, she questioned, ‘You said you could be away for a few days?’

‘Yes.’ Stuart had turned away from her and was reshuffling his papers. His voice sounded muffled and strained.

‘It’s the way things are these days, Alice. It’s something to do with a new policy decision. Even you must surely be aware of the changes the aviation industry is undergoing? The pressures on it? I mean, you do read something in the papers, don’t you, other than the women’s pages? God knows we get enough of them, judging by the bill.’

Alice stared at his white-shirt-covered back, the words of rebuttal and anger log-jamming in her throat in their furious need to be heard, but protectively she held them back.

Stuart was normally a calm, logical man—his job meant that he had to be—but just occasionally he could explode into undeserved and lacerating verbal criticism that was as unprovoked as it was unfair. Backing him into a corner or demanding an apology only resulted in him retreating into an iron-hard sulk, from which she would patiently have to coax him and right now … Right now she simply did not feel like doing any such thing!

‘You’ll never guess what happened this evening,’ she said calmly instead, going to fill the kettle. ‘Maggie told us that she’s pregnant. She gave us all a shock, especially Nicki.’

Alice tensed as Stuart came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her and nuzzling the side of her neck.

‘You never change, do you, Alice?’ he told her as he bit sensually into her skin, oblivious to her rigid tension. ‘We could be invaded by green men from outer space and you would still be more concerned about your own little life.’

Alice could hear the familiar note of mockery in his voice. It seemed to her sometimes that Stuart had spent most of their married lives mocking her or putting her down in one way or another.

‘Come on,’ Stuart demanded. ‘Let’s go to bed. I’ve missed you.’

Just for a second Alice was tempted to refuse, to pull away from him, but he was already taking hold of her hand and tugging her towards the hall door. To challenge him to dare to mock her again! But typically she stopped herself.

And, after all, what was the point in deliberately creating a difficult mood between them? Didn’t it make more sense to give in, to keep him happy? Wasn’t that what her mother had always taught her by example? As she had taught Zoë. That men were people who needed to be pandered to and coaxed, pampered and protected. That either they or their love or both simply weren’t strong enough to bear reality …

‘You prefer the twins, you always favour them!’ How often had Zoë accused her of that? Had she ‘favoured’ them or had she in reality done them anything but a favour?

The others considered her to be a perfect mother, a role model, but what was a ‘perfect’ mother?

‘Where did you eat?’ Stuart was asking her.

‘The new wine bar. The food’s Italian,’ Alice replied.

As Stuart kissed her he smiled. ‘And you didn’t have garlic! Good girl!’

Good girl! Alice could feel her jaw tensing and her body chilling. But Stuart was as oblivious to the signals her body was sending out as he was to the fact that he was patronising her, Alice recognised.

‘No, leave the light on. Please,’ Oliver demanded softly as Maggie swung her legs out of their bed and at the same time reached out to dim her bedside lamp.

It had been Dan who had encouraged her to sleep naked, but, despite the praise Oliver heaped on her body and their lovemaking, she was still self-consciously uncomfortable about him seeing her unclothed in a way she had not been with Dan. Because she was older than Oliver and her body was no longer that of a young girl?

‘I’m only going to the bathroom,’ she told him.

‘Why is it that you always want to hide yourself from me, Maggie?’ Oliver asked her quietly. ‘I love looking at your body. I love looking at you.’

He watched as she veiled her expression from him, dropping her lashes. She had so many small endearing habits that entranced him. She called herself old, but she wasn’t. Her body was slender but softly curved, her skin creamily pale—as a redhead, she had told him ruefully, she had never been able to sunbathe successfully. The natural curves of her body aroused him in a way that shrunk, dieted-down, or unnaturally enhanced supposedly ‘perfect’ female figures never could.

When they had first become lovers he had tried to persuade her to wear soft loose clothes—and no underwear. Although she had tried to hide it, he had seen from her expression that he had shocked her. A little grimly, he had reflected then that at least there was something that she had not experienced with her ex-husband. His request had not been motivated by anything demeaning or controlling, but simply by his overwhelming feelings of love for her. Just to watch her move, just to see her lift her hand and grab at her wild curls—a habit she had—and to see her body move naturally and sensually flooded him with appreciation and desire. And now knowing that her body was holding and nurturing their child added a dimension to those feelings, to his love, that ran so deep and so powerfully that it went way beyond anything he had ever imagined he might experience.

In the bathroom Maggie looked silently into the mirror as Oliver’s reflection joined her own. Standing behind her, he wrapped his arms around her, bending his head to breathe in the scent of her skin.

‘I love you, Maggie,’ he murmured to her as he turned her round and kissed her. A slow, gentle, gifting kiss that melted away her hesitation.

‘I love you too,’ she answered, and meant it. How could she not love him? She closed her eyes as he stroked her skin. His hands cupped her breasts, his mouth caressing her throat. Desire ran through her veins, hot, heavy, drugging. In the mirror she could see her breasts swelling and lifting, her nipples taut. This pregnancy would change her body for ever. In about eight months a baby would be suckling greedily on the nipples Oliver was now gently plucking. The thought made her tremble with awe and excitement.

Here, protected by Oliver’s love and desire, she could ignore the outside world, but she knew that Nicki wouldn’t be the only person to criticise her.

There had been an increasingly antagonistic reaction to pregnancies like hers in the press over recent months, a passionately attacked and defended debate on the moral implications of such situations.

The irony of what she was doing was not lost on Maggie. As a girl, her generation had made full use of the contraceptive pill to prevent and delay pregnancy, thus interfering with the cycle of nature. And now that same generation was interfering with nature once again, only this time …

She heard Oliver groan as he reached for her hand and placed it against his body.

His erection was hard, his penis bulging and full, the veins standing out against his skin—a young man’s erection. The sight of it made her shiver with sensuality. Slowly she caressed him with her fingers, fiercely barricading her mind, her memory against the intrusion of another life and another man.

Without releasing him she knelt down and took him slowly and skilfully into her mouth, caressing the head of his penis with her lips as she savoured the taste and feel of him before sliding her tongue along its stiff length.

Above her Oliver groaned out loud, burying his hands in her hair without constraining her, allowing her the freedom to dictate their intimacy.

Still holding him, Maggie licked teasingly around the distended head of his erection, using her lips and tongue to deliberately make him shudder with need before she took him back in her mouth. Holding him in its wet warmth, she caressed him with increasing intensity, taking him deeper and deeper, relishing the feel and taste of his flesh in this the most intimate of lover’s ways. As she had known he would, he withdrew from her before he came, finding her own wetness with gentle fingers before he eased himself carefully into her.

No matter how often they made love it always surprised her that she climaxed so quickly and easily with him. Somehow it was as though the deepest part of herself and her body refused to accept the shackles of inhibition imposed by a society that said that she ought to feel ashamed of the maturity of her body.

Oliver had gathered her up before he entered her, supporting her body, and now as he let her slide back down to the floor he paused for a moment before finally releasing her to kiss her mouth with deeply tender passion.

In the early days of their courtship when she had often refused to allow him to give her oral sex, he had demanded, ‘Why won’t you let me?’

Somehow she couldn’t explain to him that for her generation such an act from a man to a woman had been a much rarer pleasure than it was for his generation; a gift given on special days, at heightened moments of desire, rather than an accepted part of a familiar lovemaking ritual.

‘I love the taste of you, the feel of you, the desire of you,’ Oliver had told her passionately. ‘Please don’t deny those pleasures to me, Maggie.’

Hand in hand they went back to their bed, Oliver insisting on tucking her carefully beneath the duvet before joining her.

‘Forget about Nicki and the others,’ he whispered to her as he kissed her goodnight.

Forget? Maggie wished that were possible!

‘Stuart …’

In the darkness of their bedroom, Alice tried to reach for Stuart’s hand, but he pulled away from her, turning over, his back to her.

‘Leave it, will you, Alice?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘For God’s sake, let’s not have an in-depth inquest. So I lost a bloody erection! So what? It happens all the time. You making a drama out of it isn’t going to alter anything.’

Her making a drama out of it? Alice suppressed her desire to point out to him that she hadn’t particularly wanted to have sex in the first place and that he had been the one to suggest it.

But she could feel Stuart’s tension, and instinctively she wanted to comfort him. To reassure him, to reach out and hold him; but just as instinctively she knew he would not want her to. She could feel how shocked and disbelieving he was.

On his own side of the bed, Stuart lay staring into the darkness. Never once in all the years they had been married had he suffered an erection failure. Never. Ever.

His eyes burned as though they were filled with grit, his body gripped by tension and a sickening sense of powerlessness. He knew why it had happened, of course. Of course! How could he not? It didn’t need a series of expensive counselling sessions with a shrink to tell him. The miracle was perhaps that it hadn’t happened before!

From his childhood he could hear his father’s voice exhorting him, ‘Be a man, Stuart.’

Be a man! His father had been a man. A very special man. Stuart had known all the time he was growing up that he could never hope to rival him, that his father belonged to a rare and exclusive club whose doors would be for ever barred to him. His father was, after all, a hero and he had the medals to prove it; the medals, and the stories, the reminiscences and tales of comrades who had not possessed his own luck and who had perished.

Stuart could still vividly remember how different his father had been when he had got together with his ex-comrades. At home he had been a distant, commanding figure, constantly exhorting Stuart to live up to his maleness. He had died shortly after the twins had been born.

‘A man needs sons, Stuart,’ he had pronounced approvingly after their birth. Sons … another marker of a man’s maleness.

It was all rubbish, of course, and his views would be ridiculed now—Stuart knew that. Men and women were equal now. Equal …

Stuart closed his eyes against the burning pain seizing him. Just for a second he longed to bury himself against Alice’s sleepy warmth, to take comfort from her and be comforted by her, but how could he, when he knew …?

What was she going to say when she found out? Would she despise him? Reject him? Blame him for letting her down?

Could he blame her if she did? He had tried to prevent it happening, but all the time, from the first moment he had met Arlette Salcombe, he had known it was inevitable. That single look between them, that meeting of glances. He had known then. And now there was no way out and no way back!